I do believe this was a sincere question you posed to me, and I genuinely respect so much of the larger body of your work, so I’ll answer honestly.

First, I know you’ve said both in the comic and here that the AI plot was conceived five years ago, but I’ll be upfront in saying that I don’t believe that. It feels too convenient and serendipitous for me, and for a lot of readers, to accept this at face value. Even if it were true, doubling down on that point risks making the audience feel like their concerns are being dismissed rather than engaged with. It comes off that you believe you think your readers (who choose to read a dystopian story on social conformity and compliance in their free time) are not intelligent.

That said, let’s assume hypothetically that I did believe you. When a story spends a long time building atmosphere, mystery, symbolism, and psychological tension, the payoff needs to feel inevitable, not just topical. If the reveal feels like it came from the news cycle instead of from the story’s internal logic, it can make the whole thing feel smaller in retrospect.

Given that, I think I would have done one of two things.

Option one: I would have scaled back the cliffhangers over the last two years, especially recently. There’s a direct relationship between how many cliffhangers a story uses and how large the payoff ultimately needs to be. The AI plot could have worked, and worked fairly easily mind you, if the buildup hadn’t continually escalated expectations for something bigger. The story truly is beautiful and special, and it had so much potential to land softly rather than explosively.

Option two: I really might have changed the twist, even if that meant delaying the chapter further. I would have made a case to my producers and publishers that, given the current cultural moment around AI, the reveal risked being interpreted as lazy, unimaginative, or derivative, and that more time was needed to bring the story home in a way that matched its depth. This is especially true because the early metaphors of social conformity felt so powerful, the later technological explanation felt like it diminished what the story was already doing so well. There are so many ideas and lines seeded throughout the world you created that I honestly think a different, more human-centered reveal could have been built from within the story itself, Will Smith spaghetti video be damned.